The Right Tools for the Job

Good tools are crucial when performing routine and precise tasks. Digging a hole using a backhoe is worlds away from digging with your hands. Performing delicate surgery through a microscope versus the naked eye produces vastly different outcomes. Tools are necessary in order to produce the most effective outcomes in the shortest amount of time.

Automation and labor-saving technology have revolutionized nearly every industry, allowing them to shift their workforces from basic tasks such as raw materials processing and simple manufacturing to ever more specialized feats of engineering and technological development. This trend is no less pronounced in “virtual” work. Once tedious tasks of database synchronization, code deployment and infrastructure rollout can now be performed automatically and consistently through new software toolchains and SAAS offerings. Automation has even come to the household, allowing for tight integration and programmability of everything from thermostats and lights to deadbolts.

Network security should be no exception. With dozens or even hundreds of accounts to manage, and millions of packets across the wire at every moment, it’s simply not possible to process everything by hand. Even if it were, it would still be a bad idea – every moment a team member spends shuffling passwords, removing unauthorized devices and performing audits is a moment they can’t be developing new products and solutions to bring things forward.

CyberSana’s Auto Mitigation feature allows you to develop highly-customizable automated responses to a variety of situations. There are numerous out-of-the-box tools and remedies that can be applied, but the real power comes from being able to use an advanced scripting interface to create your own. And when it comes to developing labor-saving tooling, nobody is more dedicated – and creative – than the engineers and administrators themselves. Programming icon Larry Wall, best known for creating the PERL language, humorously described this fact when he praised the following key “virtues” of programmers:

Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it.

Impatience: The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don’t just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to.

In the drive to greater organizational efficiency, correctly anticipating and reacting to needs is paramount – and your ability to do this in the world of networking has never been greater. Whenever CyberSana’s automated and scheduled Audit Checks detect a problem with security, compliance, or any user-defined condition it will trigger the relevant Auto-Mitigation rule. The commands to be run can be invoked with an intuitive Command Input > Operand > Command Output format, as shown below:

You can extend this as far as you need it to go, from piping in data to a single binary or running sophisticated scripts incorporating multiple functions like changing permissions, revoking credentials, or modifying configurations.

Whatever your organization’s needs, CyberSana has you covered. To learn how sophisticated turnkey automation and flexible custom tooling can take your network security to the next level, talk to our experts.